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Cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift claims to have lost $230,000 in a series of hacker attacks that have occurred in the last month. The exchange will resume operation before 20 April.

Until today, the exchange has not disclosed the amount stolen. The first cyberattack took place on 14 March, carried out by one of the company's own employees, according to Shapeshift. He stole 315 BTC (about $130,000) from a hot wallet account. The criminal was promptly detected and fired, as the exchange started moving the platform to a more secure software and hardware infrastructure.

The second hacker attack was carried out on 7 April. Cybercriminals stole 97 BTC, 3600 ethers and 1900 litecoins. Two days later, on 9 April, the last cyberattack followed when hackers stole 57 BTC and 2,200 ethers from the ShapeShift’s servers. Overall the attacks resulted in a loss of about $ 100,000, according to the ShapeShift’s report quoted by CoinDesk.

ShapeShift’s CEO Erik Voorhees revealed that the fired employee sold security information to hackers, making them able to carry out the April attacks. One of the criminals told Voorhees that he had purchased access to ShapeShift’s API from a former member of staff.

The company filed a report with the authorities in order to initiate a civil lawsuit against the former employee, although no details are given as to where it would take place.

The exchange insists that the stolen funds belong to the company while client accounts are not affected. Currently, ShapeShift remains offline. Together with the Ledger Labs development team it works on upgrading the trading platform to a higher level of security.

ShapeShift is located in the Swiss canton of Zug and specialises in BTC to altcoins exchange. It allows customers to convert digital currencies without creating accounts and revealing personal data. It was the first bitcoin exchange to add ether trading to its portfolio.

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